Why I won’t be Seeing Best F(r)iends (2017) with Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero

So it looks like Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero will be reunited for the first time since The Room in the upcoming film, Best Friends Movie. Is this incredibly exciting? Well… yes and no. Grab your spoons roomies, my stance on this may not be what you expect….

Bad movies made intentionally bad are usually incredibly boring – remember The Tommy Wi-Show? I suspect this film will try too hard to be funny, full of jokey callbacks, thus lacking the unintentional charm that we all love so much about The Room.

But regardless of this film’s quality, I won’t be seeing it, mostly due to the fact that Tommy has become more of a corporate machine than a filmmaker. Over the years, I have poured countless dollars into supporting him – I own the film on DVD, I purchased the screenplay. I have a ‘The Room’ hoodie and even Tommy Wiseau underwear, all purchased from TW’s online store. Then of course, there’s the countless theatrical screenings I’ve attended.

This man owns me.

But Tommy made one movie 13 years ago, and still profits from it today without offering the world anything new creatively (Unwatchable, incomprehensible schlock like The Neighbors doesn’t count). Tommy doesn’t hold a candle to someone like Neil Breen, who has released four hilarious b-movies in just over ten years – and he’s already working on his 5th.

I want to see something new, a film made with the “passion of Tennessee Williams,” rather than Tommy recycling old jokes, capitalising on his one success. Wouldn’t it be great if Tommy wrote a new drama – a personal story he truly cared about? The first time he did this, we got an amazing, timeless work of art – The Room. I’d like to see him try something like that again.

And when a film does come along for passionate fans of The Room like myself, Tommy Wiseau steps in and stifles it, pulling it from theatres. I’m talking of course about Rick Harper‘s documentary Room Full of Spoons. Something in that film has offended Tommy, and he’s afraid it will make him look stupid. What he fails to realise, of course, is that fans already don’t think much of Tommy – they love his complexity, the unique and baffling mystery of a man. Unjustified censoring of the documentary is only going to hurt his business in the long run – Room Full Of Spoons could easily introduce a new generation to Tommy’s work. For these reasons and more, I refuse to spend another dime on anything Tommy until he’s willing to at least make this documentary theatrically available, as it should be. Does anyone agree?